We are all worried about the future of our nation right now. We’ve watched video of the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, learned about the death of Breonna Taylor, viewed Amy Cooper calling the police on Chris Cooper, and realized that six years after Eric Garner, eight years after Trayvon Martin, and twenty-one years after Amadou Diallo, nothing seems to have changed. The list keeps growing, and nothing seems to change.
As urban planners, we are a community of professionals seeking to make better places for everyone: safer, healthier, more sustainable and prosperous. We work on inclusive housing policies and sustainable transportation investments. We try to reduce carbon emissions to stop the disastrous changes in our planet’s climate and provide everyone access to parks and open space.
The events of the past week are powerful reminders – which we should not have needed – that the physical fabric of a community is only as strong as the social contracts beneath it. That parks and housing and schools and jobs and transit need to be accessible and safe for everyone. And they aren’t. Not even close.
The seeds of inequality go back to the founding of our nation, and a 400-year-old legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and institutional racism. But our profession has a special culpability and responsibility to fight against inequality. Beginning in the early 20th century, many of the tools of our trade – zoning and land use regulations; housing policies and financial assistance; redevelopment statutes and large public investments; the location and design of parks and transportation systems – were deployed precisely to separate communities, benefit one class or race over others, and oppress and disenfranchise people of color. The effects of this legacy run deep, creating deeply segregated communities which determine everything from a person’s educational status to their income to their life expectancy.
And of course, COVID-19 has exploited and exacerbated these inequalities, preying on the elderly, the poor, the under-housed and those with pre-existing health conditions. It shouldn’t surprise any of us that black and brown people are over twice as likely to become sick and die of COVID-19 as their white neighbors. Or that the jobs they are most likely to hold have been destroyed by the economic fallout, while primarily white workers in high-paying industries have been spared the worst consequences. Or that many of the policies and interventions we’ve put in place to mitigate against coronavirus have mostly helped those who needed it the least.
At Regional Plan Association, we have been on both sides of this issue over our 98-year history. We’re proud of ground-breaking work we performed in the 1960s to empower community activists, but we need to acknowledge our complicity in constructing racist zoning codes in post-war suburban communities. Today we are focusing our efforts on building an equitable transit system for the entire region, but we also spent decades promoting automobiles and expanding highways that would allow rich, white communities to wall themselves off from their poorer neighbors.
Decades of racist policies cannot be solved by a single policy or a change in leadership. We’re going to need to undo the destruction we have caused by eliminating the physical and institutional barriers we have created and making sure that everyone has the opportunity to live a full and healthy life, no matter where they were born or who their parents are. This will take years to accomplish, and it needs to start now.
